Are you actually asking me to disclose customer information and taking my (obvious) refusal to do so as calling BS? Interesting. Look, I have no skin in the game, if you're happy forking over tons of money for stuff you don't strictly speaking need then more power to you.
All I note is that MS thinks YC is important enough to designate a person to sway them to the MS stack and SAAS products, this is a tried and true strategy (get them while they're young) and it will likely cost you dearly in the long term if you aren't able to oversee the long term disadvantages of such a move. If you have a long history of using microsoft products and switching to open operating systems and stack components would mean lost time due to re-training then by all means stick to what you know.
It's funny how in one subthread here people are arguing that hosting and bandwidth are the major expenses for any start-up and now it's hosting and costs are 2%. In the end every situation is different and every situation has a different cost analysis for the workload envisioned. Seeing the guts of many companies has shown me that if you're doing something that requires large numbers of expensive licenses or metered bandwidth / cycles / storage then you're probably going to regret that choice at a later point.
Except you're not forced into using Microsoft SOFTWARE when using Azure. Like many others have pointed out, you are free to use Linux variants as well.
All I note is that MS thinks YC is important enough to designate a person to sway them to the MS stack and SAAS products, this is a tried and true strategy (get them while they're young) and it will likely cost you dearly in the long term if you aren't able to oversee the long term disadvantages of such a move. If you have a long history of using microsoft products and switching to open operating systems and stack components would mean lost time due to re-training then by all means stick to what you know.
It's funny how in one subthread here people are arguing that hosting and bandwidth are the major expenses for any start-up and now it's hosting and costs are 2%. In the end every situation is different and every situation has a different cost analysis for the workload envisioned. Seeing the guts of many companies has shown me that if you're doing something that requires large numbers of expensive licenses or metered bandwidth / cycles / storage then you're probably going to regret that choice at a later point.